Ethics committees: The challenges facing 21st century bioethics

Abstract

This article argues that 21st century bioethics should focus on improving ethics committees and its procedures. Backed by international bodies as UNESCO and states the implementation of ethics infrastructures as necessary for approaching the ethical issues related to medicine, life sciences and associated technologies have become a way of “doing” bioethics irrespective of their scope and, from a critical point of view, with a certain degree of distortion in their creation. Likewise, the article predicts that the union between bioethics and human rights supported by the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights will mark the future of bioethics, placing the committees in a strategic position, as mechanisms to put in practice the principles it establishes. The union between bioethics and human rights shows that defining bioethics remains a challenge. In relation to this issue the article points out the basic traces of the discipline and its contents. It also points out the evolution from bioethics of an autonomist nature to a 21st century bioethics with a marked social character that ethics committees should put into practice integrating principles as social responsability and health in bioethical reflection trying to solve and eradicate inequalities. Orientation of research and development in nanotechnology provides an example of the ideas this article aims to present, and specifically how ethics committees have a key role in 21st century bioethics.